I would phrase it more politely, but yeah i'd say that was probably the case... it would be fun to see if people would claim media bias if someone took the stories and switched the names and charges.

The norm is to want to shape something to fit one's perspective on the world and sell it to your target audience in such a way that you end up maintaining your readership.  Currently, everything Newscorp is an all out media war against everything Occupy.  On page one of the NY Post was a link to an editorial that was entitled "Enough".  A day or two before, front page, they ran an article on how Occupy is costing jobs in NYC.

The entire thing is an attempt to sway opinion.  Newscorp is Rupert Murdock's mouthpiece used to sway public opinion.  That is what happens.  And then one can say, "go to new media" which ends up being blogosphere rumor mongering, taking one point, playing the telephone game and having it morph into some zero-point "truth".

The problem is that Newscorp and Fox News are pretty much shorthand for shitty advocacy journalism to the point that the very mention of the words "Fox News" is enough to inspire guffaws in a lot of circles. But at least Newcorp's outlets tend to wear their bias on their sleeves, whereas other outlets like the AP are supposed to represent SERIOUS JOURNALISM but are in reality no better than Fox or the New York Post. There are far too many SERIOUS JOURNALISTS like Dan Balz who play this silly little game where they insist that, while they do have opinions like any other person, they aren't being biased just so long as they don't come right out and tell you what those opinions are.

I remember seeing a Reuters article recently that said that Occupy Wall Street would cheer (pardon my condensing of memories here, and possible biased conculsions) that the Pope came out and advocated there be a global bank.  Really?

Anyhow, what happened with Fox News (my take here) is that it picked up that being partisan would draw a specific demographic and to keep feeding it a certain line would cater to a certain group.  With some success of that, MS's Need Barack Channel (MSNBC) ended up doing it from the left.  Running news 24/7 leads to a need to feed itself with eyeballs, or else it ends up not being able to keep itself afloat.   I think 24/7 anything is going to lead to this.  I have seen heavy BS in all-sports coverage also, where they make up stories, refute it, and generate a week's worth of news out of nothing before they opened up their mouths.

I think the business side is that you wear your bias on your sleeve to the extent it will get you sufficient readership or viewers.  If having the pretense of non-bias works best for most business that is done.  If being out there does it, you do that.  

And I say, ok if they want to do this.  I do say that more is needed.  Things like the federal debt of the United States should be some sort of common ground that shouldn't continue.  But, the common ground gets sold out in the name of getting more into your camp.

But is that necessarily a bad thing? I think the journalism of Fox News and MSNBC could be improved upon, to say the very least, but is it really worse to be flamboyantly biased than it is to be just as biased but couch it in dreary j-school prose such that people who don't know better will just assume that it's the cold hard truth? Personally, I always feel like the former are at least marginally less insulting to my intelligence than the latter and their ridiculous "if I don't tell you I'm biased, you can't know that I'm biased!" mentality.

It isn't a bad thing if it gets so outrageously horrible, there is a general agreement that it is all B.S and people move away from it.  A problem that happens, short of that, is you get people increasingly falling into one camp or the the other, being political fanboys and being unable, to any extent to even agree to the most basic of things going on.  In this, there is no point in society where people will stop and take pause and be human.  Everything gets so political, people rip each other to shreads.  At this point, how do you even run a society at all?

Pretty much, on a practical level, you lose people being neighbors.  You know, that case where you would help someone in genuine need irregardless of their political views?  In short there is a lack of respect and even common courtesy.  Like, where I am I see this.  Someone rips down a sign for the county executive who is a Republican.  Someone else decides to stick the words "tax and spender" on the Democrat's sign who is running for county executive.  There is no respect or manners at all.

I will go with this Brad Stine video on the outro to this post:

There are dangers to people living in an echo chamber, sure, but I'm not really sure why Fox News is seen as the genesis of this phenomenon. Just as MSNBC's hard left turn was perhaps a business strategy inspired by Fox's success, Fox originally found that success by filling a niche that was left open by a media landscape in which you were hard pressed to see conservative ideas given a fair shake. Back when CNN was the only game in town you would have a supposedly straight news anchor talking with no less a controversial figure than Jesse Jackson and lobbing softball after softball without challenging him on anything. (In fact, I seem to remember Jesse Jackson having his own show on CNN at one point.) Any conservative, meanwhile, was to be met with the utmost skepticism.

I don't really agree that advocacy media really creates division overly much, either. For one thing, even Fox as the king of the hill gets, what, something like six million viewers a day in prime time? Not a whole lot of people even watch or read the news anymore. So while it does seep out into the culture at large and I'm sure it does help keep it going to some small extent, the real and increasingly irreconcilable differences in political philosophy are the primary drivers here, in conjunction with a culture of self-worship in which people have become more and more incivil in apolitical matters as well.

On another note, the demographics of Occupy Wall Street:

It is interesting that, in a country that is 77.1% white and 12.9% black a protest in a city that is 44.6% white and  25.1% black, a protest can be made up of 81.2% white people and 1.6% black people without being called racist; especially after a much more representative Tea-Party movement was called racist because of its lack of diversity ...

(That was mostly just a "jab" at the media)

Realistically, what I'm more interested in is the education segment ... With (roughly) 90% of the population of Occupy Wallstreet being college educated, ollege educated people are significantly over-represented; and with the high level of unemployment (relative to college graduates in general) it could be argued that these people should really be angry at themselves and their colleges for getting useless degrees ...

http://www.thenation.com/article/164348/audacity-occupy-wall-street?page=full

A few years ago, Joe Therrien, a graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, was working as a full-time drama teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. Frustrated by huge class sizes, sparse resources and a disorganized bureaucracy, he set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion—puppetry. Three years and $35,000 in student loans later, he emerged with degree in hand, and because puppeteers aren’t exactly in high demand, he went looking for work at his old school. The intervening years had been brutal to the city’s school budgets—down about 14 percent on average since 2007. A virtual hiring freeze has been in place since 2009 in most subject areas, arts included, and spending on art supplies in elementary schools crashed by 73 percent between 2006 and 2009. So even though Joe’s old principal was excited to have him back, she just couldn’t afford to hire a new full-time teacher. Instead, he’s working at his old school as a full-time “substitute”; he writes his own curriculum, holds regular classes and does everything a normal teacher does. “But sub pay is about 50 percent of a full-time salaried position,” he says, “so I’m working for half as much as I did four years ago, before grad school, and I don’t have health insurance…. It’s the best-paying job I could find.”

I don't want to be rude, but it seems that kids today are suffering because they're making very bad educational choices and are unwilling to own up to their part in this, consider the following graph:

In spite of the massive growth in IT, and the amazing need for people with engineering, math, science and technology degrees, the number of graduates in in-demand fields has remaind stagnant for 30 years while there has been an explosion in "worthless" degrees.

I suppose it's the whole phenomenon of American students falling behind students in other countries in math, science, etc., but excelling at self-esteem, coming home to roost. Nothing in these people's lives is their own fault. If there is a unifying message behind Occupy Everything, it seems to be, "We played by the rules, we were told all we had to do was go to college and we'd be set for life, so it must be that we're being screwed." So Joe Therrien figures a degree in puppetry (not even puppetry of the penis, Joe? what a miserable slacker you are) is just as good as a degree in, say, civil engineering, and he's just as entitled to the good life as anyone because he went before the high priests of higher education and was credentialed by them.

This "massive growth" you speak of in IT is not here in North America.  Any work, like software development, which can go offshore, does go offshore now.  Computer programmers was listed as a field demanding less people.  Computer science is a field generally geared in that area.  Also, it is a field not everyone is suited for.  Generally, the norm is computer tech people are horrible in other areas requiring good interpersonal skills.  And industry increasingly shifting to contractors, which it is, wants people who hit the ground running.  On the whole, college are bad in the area of properly training people for tech jobs.  The industry relies on certification as the norm, and colleges don't do that.  Another aspect of the tech industry is that it is a very tight in what it demands, and skills it looks for.  It is a mix of a hodgepodge of different tech, them expecting all of the above, and if missing they don't hire.  On top of that, it is feast or famine for employment, with a practice of them not hiring anyone who is out of work any period of time.  In short, the pay out can be higher, but the risks are higher.  It be worth considering because of how unstable the job market is there, that people won't go into that field.  You don't think the word of outsourcing hasn't hit the IT industry?  When an industry treats its workers as disposable, people aren't eager to go into that industry.  That happened with the oil industry also.  They ended up losing their labor base after they laid off people, and they went on elsewhere.  Students wouldn't go into fields in that area, because of what had happened.  Any industry that has a labor shortage only has itself to blame.

Another reality is that there is too many people graduating for college degrees, for a job market that doesn't need them in practice.  Segments of the economy end up repositioning themselves for people with any college degree, using it as a form of character test, a very pricey one at that to.

Also, there are these global trends of globalization and automating, which also have put the pressure on wages and driven people into local job markets, for stuff that can't be subject to automating and globalization, which also pay a lot less.  This goes into it:

http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=9521